Cameras are used in many different applications, both indoors and outdoors, to monitor a variety of environments. In certain situations there may be a need to treat one part of a captured image different from another part, such as when there is a need to mask part of an image in a situation where a camera is placed inside a building or inside a bus or a train and the environment outside is to be excluded from the monitoring done by the camera. Another example is when a building with windows is monitored and there is a need to avoid monitoring the inside of the building through the window.
In such instances, a privacy mask may be defined by an operator during set-up of the surveillance equipment. The operator would usually create the mask by marking the window to be masked on the image in a graphical user interface.
However, improvements in this area are still of interest.